


Liking and Loving

by angel_deux



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, and i WONT apologize for it, because i certainly can't find it!!, everyone is at winterfell still for no reason except i want them there, gratuitous jaime and sansa friendship, if there is a plot to this please someone let me know, jaime and bran are also buds, post season 8 au where i explain nothing about politics, so are jaime and brienne, so...you know...my brand
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:54:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28489383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: After the wars are done, Jaime and Brienne remain at Winterfell, and Jaime tries to decide how to tell Brienne that he loves her.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 32
Kudos: 288
Collections: JB Festive Festival Exchange Stocking Stuffers 2020





	Liking and Loving

**Author's Note:**

  * For [slipsthrufingers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/slipsthrufingers/gifts).



> for my brother, the absolute best person, slips, who arranged this lovely exchange for us and deserves everything good in the world <333

There is one rather shameful thing about Jaime that he wishes wasn’t true—well, there’s a host of shameful things, really, but he’s learned to live with most of them.

But this one is fairly new, and it’s mostly just _embarrassing: h_ e’s sort of a gossip.

He used to hate the gossip of court. People snickering about each other, trying to probe at everyone’s weaknesses and trying to gather power to themselves by stripping it from someone else. He hated it when Tyrion used it. He hated it when Cersei used it. His father would’ve rather shaved his own eyebrows than admit that he used gossip like a maester’s knife, wielded with a precision that could devastate entire families, but of course that’s exactly what he did. And he relished in it the same way any common court gossip relished in petty scandals and delicious whispers about whose wife was fucking which servant.

But it’s different, now, at Winterfell, and Jaime finds that he’s…enjoying himself.

There’s really no reason to still be in Winterfell at all. It’s months after the battle against the dead. King’s Landing has been nearly destroyed by the combined efforts of the dragon queen and his dear, dead sister. Jon Snow has returned to Winterfell to pretend that he’s not the heir of any throne at all while the vultures in the capital—Jaime’s beloved brother included—try to figure out a way to form a new system of government when they’ve got maybe seven genuinely clever ideas between all of them. Jaime doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about the vacuum of power, and he doesn’t care about the fact that there’s no reason for him to stay, and he doesn’t care about Tyrion’s letters, in which Tyrion passively aggressively hints at how they have to figure out what to do about Casterly Rock, so maybe Jaime should return home and stop mooching off the Stark’s bizarre, extended generosity.

Jaimie replies to every other point of Tyrion’s correspondence except the ones that involve him leaving this miserable fucking tundra of a place, and he doesn’t think about why he’s being so stubborn and clinging to Winterfell like the moss that’s started growing on the old Broken Tower. It’s just…he’s not done here. He doesn’t know what exactly he still has to do, but he’s not done. He can’t leave. He doesn’t want to.

Tyrion would laugh at him if Jaime told him any of this, of course, which is why Jaime doesn’t. He spends his days _helping_ people, and Tyrion would probably shudder at the thought while Cersei would laugh at him and Tywin would say something dramatic about Jaime not being his son because he’s not a dick one hundred percent of the time, but Jaime doesn’t care. His family cannot touch him here. Most of them are dead. The rest of them are in disgrace. Jaime doesn’t need to worry about them.

He knows that the wound he took in the battle against the dead probably saved his life. It was months before he was ready to travel, and by that point Cersei was dead and most of the grief had already been swallowed up in something like bewildered relief that he was still alive. He supposes he must have really believed that they would die without each other. But then, he thought that he’d die without his right hand, too, and he lived through that fine. It’s different, of course. It’s a different kind of grief. But it’s no less survivable.

Brienne, he thinks, also knows that his wound saved his life. She looks at him sometimes with this miserable guilt in her expression, and he doesn’t know how to tell her that he would much rather be alive and here with her than dead and buried beside Cersei in whatever anonymous hole Tyrion chucked her bones into. Sometimes he thinks Brienne understands him better than anyone, but other times…

He does find an odd amount of solace in talking with Sansa. She’ll stop him in the hall, ask to speak with him, and they’ll stand on the walk above the training ground while Sansa speaks with barely veiled amusement about whatever gossip she has for him, and he’ll reply with something dry and amusing that will make her smile while she tries to stop herself from smiling, and it feels like he has been re-centered, every time. There is no need for some great purpose. He does not need to prove himself worthy of being here. He is happy here, happy with the people he has chosen to surround himself with. Why can’t that be enough?

* * *

He comes across Bran, one day, sitting outside the Broken Tower, wrapped up in blankets and left to stare balefully up at the scaffolding around the new construction. Jaime’s footsteps falter, and Bran turns and looks at him, and he sighs, and it’s the relief in the sigh that really undoes Jaime, makes something inside him knot into a fist and then shatter against his ribcage.

“Finally,” Bran says. “I think Sam forgot I’m out here. He went in to discuss something with the builders.”

In the months after the battle against the dead, Bran became less and less the Three Eyed Whatever He Was and more and more himself, and now it is common to hear him say things in this petulant, almost-young voice. He is not quite a boy anymore, really. He has been taking on a man’s responsibilities beside his sister, learning how to run Winterfell even though he claims that he does not want it, and would prefer for Sansa to remain Lady of Winterfell and for himself to find something more exciting to do. Jaime understands that; he too was raised to take on the responsibilities of a castle’s lord, and he spent the better part of his life avoiding it. Technically, he is _still_ avoiding it.

“That’s not like Sam,” Jaime says, sarcastic, because of course it’s very much like Sam. Jaime has more than once stumbled across Bran just like this, sitting impatiently and waiting outside Sam’s rooms or in the library or in the maester’s tower. They really have to construct the boy a better chair, one he can push for himself. Bran seems eager to learn from Sam, but Sam is a forgetful lad, and swamped with his own responsibilities. “At least he left you with a decent blanket this time.”

Bran makes a grumbling noise of agreement and looks back up at the tower.

“You know, that’s quite a long way to fall.”

Jaime freezes, because sometimes…well, you never know, really. Months have shown him the kind of person Bran is—a shit, mostly—but there is always a tiny bit of fear in Jaime that one day he’s going to wake up and find that everyone in the castle has turned against him, remembering suddenly all the things he did that make him horrid, unsuitable as a companion to Lady Stark and her brother, and her sister, and everyone in the entire fucking north.

But then Bran looks at him, the corner of his mouth turned just slightly up, a bit of a mischievous sparkle in his eye, and Jaime can breathe again.

“I’ll take your word for it,” he says.

He pushes Bran back toward the castle. Bran bitches about the construction in the Broken Tower taking too long, and the fact that Jon doesn’t seem inclined to push the Free Folk to work any harder, and the fact that Sansa still treats him like a baby sometimes, and doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with it when she’s called out.

“I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I still treat my brother like a baby sometimes,” Jaime points out, and Bran groans theatrically and tells him to shut up, and contentment settles over Jaime, like a warm blanket after a day spent outside in the cold. Like a well-tended fire in his room. Like meeting Brienne’s eyes over a mug of tea and seeing her answering smile. It all feels too good to be true, sometimes, but Jaime is determined not to fuck it up.

He drops Bran off with one of the maesters-in-training, who apologizes profusely to both of them, as if pushing Bran across the courtyard is a particular hardship for Jaime. He waves the man off with annoyance and then goes back out to the courtyard, where Gendry Baratheon/Waters/Whatever He Feels Like Answering To Today is hammering away at something, gratuitously shirtless, while Arya Stark shamelessly watches, eating an apple, her brows furrowed like Gendry’s presenting some kind of problem that she’s trying to figure out how to solve. Sansa is watching them both with a private grin while she talks to one of her companions, a Free Folk girl who’s nodding eagerly at whatever Sansa’s saying.

He passes Jon and Brienne on his way to the kitchens. Jon is frowning thoughtfully at the Broken Tower while Brienne explains something about the construction work. Jaime can hear her steady voice. Not the words, but the tone. It’s a patience that calms Jaime whenever he hears it. When he was recovering, she used to sit by his bed a lot and fill him in on the things he missed while he was bedridden, and frequently he would drift off to the sound of it. He’d always have to apologize, because she was always so affronted about it when he saw her next. He never knew how to explain it to her; he feels safe with her. Not just safe, but _comfortable_. Her voice just does something to him. Maybe it didn’t feel like a compliment when he was nodding off every time she spoke to him for too long, but in his defense, he was injured. Now that he’s recovered, he could listen to her talk for hours, but that’s the kind of thing that he hasn’t figured out how to say.

There are a lot of things like that. Things he can’t explain to Brienne. He doesn’t really understand them himself. He knows that he loves her. He has had months to learn it, and to understand it, and he has examined himself and his own feelings and the shape of them inside him and what it means to him to feel the things he does for her. Months of it, and he might drive himself mad if he keeps thinking about it. He just…he wanted to be sure. He isn’t a man given to much extensive thought about his own feelings. He feels them, he acts. That’s how he’s always been. But something about Brienne makes him want to be cautious. She is so strong, and so steady, and he understands her well enough to know how hard-fought and hard-won that strength and steadiness was, and he thinks he really would rather die than take that away from her. And in the months after Cersei’s death, Jaime wanted to be sure, and he wanted _her_ to be sure. He didn’t want her to think that he was reaching out to fill the void that Cersei left. He was quite sure himself that that wasn’t what he was doing, but he was hesitant. He wasted most of his life thinking that he understood his own heart, only to realize far too late that he didn’t know himself at all. He doesn’t want something like that to happen again. He doesn’t want to think that he has fallen in love with Brienne only to discover that he just needed something, someone, some person to love who he believed might love him back.

But that isn’t what this is. He’s sure of it now.

He just has to figure out a way to tell her.

* * *

Sansa knows it. Of course she does; Sansa knows everything, and there’s little that the gossipmongers among the servants and the Free Folk and the remaining guests like to do more than gossip about Jaime Lannister and his Lady. Sansa, of course, encourages that talk, mostly because she likes to torture him, but also, he is sure, because she is trying to pressure him into actually doing something about it.

Most of the Free Folk have an appreciation for Brienne that’s more polite and less crude than the _appreciation_ that Tormund Giantsbane foisted upon her when he was still around. They like that she’s strong. They like that she’s trusted. They generally treat the southerners as some incomprehensible, idiot society, but they like the faith that the Starks have shown in Brienne regardless of her sex. Not that their own attitudes towards women are always at all palatable, but Jaime at least agrees with them that strength is a particular measure of a person no matter what body they were born into, and that Brienne deserves to be appreciated for that strength. She has gotten more used to their attentions months in, and everywhere she goes, she has a bevy of eager Free Folk children and toddlers hanging off her legs and demanding to be picked up and carried and taught how to fight. Brienne laughs at them, and she treats their eagerness gently, and Jaime watches and hungers and yearns, and it’s really quite pathetic.

Of course Sansa notices. _Everyone_ must notice.

So when Brienne receives a letter from her father and asks Sansa to be released from her service because she has decided that it’s time to return, for at least a time, to Tarth, the first person that Sansa informs is Jaime.

She doesn’t even pretend that it’s a casual conversation, the way she usually does, bringing up some Free Folk lout who’s shown interest in Brienne with a kind of coy smile and an eye to Jaime that makes him feel Seen and Uncomfortable. She sits him down in her office, pours him a drink, and tells him, while looking straight into his eyes, that Brienne is leaving.

Jaime absorbs the blow the way he absorbs everything: annoyance, grief, a wry acceptance that his life was bound to turn to shit eventually because it’s been months of happiness and that’s apparently too much to ask…but he’s fairly sure that none of it shows on his face, because these things usually don’t.

It’s enough, apparently, for Sansa. She leans back in her seat, looking satisfied.

“I thought so,” she says.

“Ugh,” he replies.

“You’ll go with her, of course.”

“I’m sure she’d love that.”

“Yes, she would. Except I’m not being sarcastic when I say that.”

“If she wants me to go with her, she’ll ask me.”

Sansa laughs at that. Laughs at it quite a lot, actually, to the point where it starts to get vaguely insulting and she wipes her eyes and shakes her head at him and covers her mouth to laugh some more.

“All right,” he snaps.

“Well, come on. You know her as well as I do. Of course she’s not going to ask you. Jaime, it’s been months. What are you waiting for?”

“I don’t know,” he admits, because it’s true. He supposes he could keep trying to deflect, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a point. Actually, he’s been sort of desperate for _someone_ to help him figure this out, but it’s not like he was going to ask anyone, especially not a girl his daughter’s age. It’s too embarrassing. Jaime keeps thinking that he has no shame anymore, nothing to embarrass him, and he keeps being reminded that there are still parts of him that are deeply prideful and shitty and mired in this self-image that was built and fractured and then built again by his family over the course of his life. Like the layers of stonework that are going into the slow reconstruction of the Broken Tower. A horrible, patchwork ego, broken and splintered and pasted back together as his family saw fit. His fault, of course, for not realizing what they were doing, and his fault for falling into their traps, and his fault for being past forty and still stinging from old wounds like a child.

“If you’re waiting for some miracle, this is probably it,” Sansa says. “The two of you would probably be content to wait for each other forever, as long as you were here. But she’s leaving, and that means that you have to do _something_.”

“I’m not going to ask her to stay. If she needs to go…”

“I’m not telling you to ask her to stay.”

“Then what are you telling me?”

“Your brother is deeply annoying. Did you know that?”

“Of course I know that. You may have been married to him, but I had to live with him when he was a _child_. Can you imagine?”

“No. I can’t. Letters are bad enough. And he sends many of them. Apparently Lord Tyrion is bored, in King’s Landing. Bored, and he wants to figure out what to do with Casterly Rock, because you won’t just give it to him but you also won’t just tell him you’re taking it, and you know how little he likes these things to be unsettled.”

“I figured I should keep my options open. You never know when the infamous hospitality of the Starks is going to run out.”

“It’s only _infamous_ because the rest of Westeros can’t understand why we’ve put up with _you_ for this long,” Sansa says primly. “And, frankly, I like to make them wonder. You’re safe here as long as you want to be.”

“Is this because I was wounded saving your life in the crypts?”

“It’s many things. Don’t make me say them. I don’t like flattering you any more than I have to.”

“Fair enough.”

“You make Bran laugh,” Sansa says. She looks at him sternly, harshly, as if reminding him not to bring up anything else about Bran. Sometimes he does. Reminds her. He doesn’t know why, except that he knows he is terrible when it comes to self-preservation, and he always likes to test the limits of his welcome, make sure that they can’t forget who he is and who he was and what he did. Jon sometimes glowers, but Sansa never does. She always arches her eyebrows in this perfect display of dominance. _Are you done?_ “You’re helpful to Jon, for a number of reasons. You’re helpful to me. Even Arya has stopped threatening to gut you.”

“Has she? I’ve just been tuning those threats out for so long, I didn’t notice she’d stopped.”

“Mm. I was surprised too.”

“Probably just distracted by Gendry coming back.”

“Well, there’s that.”

“Why _is_ he back?”

“We all know why he’s back.”

“Sure, but why does _he_ say he’s back?”

“He said he didn’t like being a lord, so he quit.”

Jaime cackles at that, and Sansa smiles quietly, pleased with herself for relaying the information.

“Fantastic,” Jaime says. “If only we all had the courage.”

“Well, you could.”

“But then it would be Tyrion’s, and I don’t know that I want him to have it, honestly.”

“Mm,” Sansa agrees. “A more powerful Tyrion is a dangerous Tyrion. Which is why you should go back to King’s Landing and meet with him. You stopped answering his letters, so he’s been sending them to me. I don’t want his letters either, especially since they’re just whining about how you refuse to answer him or do your duty. Brienne is going back to Tarth. Am I being obvious enough for you now?”

“Fairly bold to talk about how annoying Tyrion is while wearing that smug face you know I hate,” Jaime says. Sansa laughs at him. Sips her drink again.

“You only hate it because you know I’m right,” she says.

* * *

And, well. She is. When Brienne tells him, finally, several days later, that she’s setting off for Tarth soon, and asks him to watch over Lady Sansa in her absence, Jaime informs her that he will not be able to comply because Sansa is sending him to King’s Landing to meet with Tyrion. Brienne treats this announcement with the suspicion that it deserves, but she’s too well mannered to badger Sansa about it, and so she swallows back any objections and leaves Podrick in her place instead. Podrick looks after them a bit like an abandoned pup when she and Jaime ride out towards King’s Landing, but Jaime can’t bring himself to feel too guilty about it. There are weeks of travel ahead of them, and he has more pressing things to worry about. Namely: what to tell Brienne. _How_ to tell Brienne.

He thinks of nothing in their first few days of travel. It is simple, with Brienne. She builds the fire. He prepares the food. She insists on taking first watch, and he mocks her for her uprightness and then snoozes by the fire until it’s his turn to take watch. He jokes often about their first trip together, and Brienne responds to his jokes sometimes but most often just rolls her eyes and smiles privately to herself.

It’s annoying how much Jaime misses Winterfell. Annoying that he misses Arya pretending not to flirt with Gendry, who is busy pretending not to own any shirts. Annoying that he misses Bran taking any opportunity to fuck with him. Annoying that he misses Sansa passing him in the hall and giving him that particular _look_ that means that she has something interesting to share with him. He even misses Jon and his stupid bun and his stupid way of looking like a kicked dog that always makes Jaime want to make him smile, like it’s his responsibility.

It’s all annoying. He hates Winterfell. He hates the north. He hates the upright kindness of the Starks and their annoying self-righteousness. He should not miss them. He’s returning to King’s Landing, which he vastly prefers. He’s returning to his family.

But he can tell himself these things all he wants. He knows that something has shifted inside him. Something deeply wounded that retreated into himself all those months at Winterfell and now feels himself aching for it in the same way he ached for Casterly Rock when he left, the first time. Not that Winterfell was ever really a home to him, or more than just a temporary home, a place to lick his wounds and delay thinking about what would come next. But it was the place where he felt like he was reborn. The place where he learned to care for himself. It was home of a kind, and now he doesn’t know if he will be going back, and he supposes it is right, to miss it.

* * *

They move slowly, he and Brienne. They take their time. He wonders if she is as reluctant to reach her destination as he is. He asks her questions about Tarth, sometimes, about what she is returning to, and he finds that her answers are hesitant. Wary. He knows what it’s like to grow up in a place that was a home but _not_ a home at the same time, and he sees some of that in Brienne’s careful speech. She speaks well enough of her father. Better than he speaks of his, anyway. But there is a history there, and she isn’t sure how to feel about going home. He understands. He doesn’t feel sure about what he’s going to find when he gets to King’s Landing, either.

On one of those early days, there is a storm. Nothing compared to the kind of weather they saw at Winterfell, but they’re not far south enough yet to escape the worry of it entirely. Jaime wakes cold in the middle of the night to find Brienne hunched and miserable by the fire, snow falling thickly around them. The wind is picking up, so they douse the fire, and they make their way back toward an abandoned farmstead they passed earlier. They’d been wary about stopping during the day, but in the dark, they can see that there’s no fire inside, and they look at each other, and they decide together, wordlessly, that it’s worth checking out, for the small amount of shelter it might offer.

Brienne enters first, and he creeps around the outside, checking out the run-down stable out back. It’s barely big enough for their two horses, but once Brienne confirms that the cabin is empty, the creatures don’t seem to mind that it’s snug. They just seem happy to be out of the wind. Jaime can relate. Brienne starts a fire in the small fireplace. It’s not much warmer inside than it was out in the storm, and there are holes in the outer walls after what seems like years of abandonment, but it’s cozy enough, Jaime supposes, with the fire going. There’s one bedroom in back, but by wordless agreement, he and Brienne both decide that it’ll be nicer on the floor by the fire, and so Jaime gathers an armload of blankets and brings them out to her. They shake them out, and Jaime tries not to daydream too obviously about his warm room in Winterfell, just down the hall from Brienne’s.

Then again, just down the hall is a lot farther than this. Brienne spreads out their bedrolls carefully beside one another, and the pillows from the bed are decent enough. It’s comfortable, and Brienne is close, and Jaime thinks he could be happy like this for a long while. Days. Weeks. Living in this shitty, rundown house. He opens his mouth to tell her so. Closes it again. Then, fuck it. Why not? He sits up. Brienne is snuggled down into her own bedroll, and she’s watching him, her eyes big and reflecting the firelight, like she knows what he’s going to do. It almost deflates him, but it doesn’t. It’s madness brought on by waking in the middle of the night and wandering through a snowstorm. Or it’s the madness of impatience. Of wanting her closer and thinking that maybe she could be, if only he knew the right words to say. He doesn’t know them. He thinks he has been waiting to find them, but this impatience, impulsivity, this madness, whatever it is, it has seized him and made him think that the words are not important. It has never been about the words between he and Brienne, and by gods, he has waited so long. Long enough.

“I don’t want to go to King’s Landing,” he tells her. Brienne’s brow furrows at him. She looks adorable, rumpled, her hair drying in soft curls around her face, the way it looked when they first met and he hated and resented her for keeping him away from his sister. He could not hate her less now, and that softness coils tightly in his belly, so tight that it almost feels like sickness.

“All right,” she tells him, dubious.

“Tarth,” he says. “I want to go to Tarth.”

Now her dubiousness is in her expression, too, and she arches one eyebrow at him like Sansa has done a million times, and it makes him laugh.

“I do,” he says. “Tarth, or Winterfell, or right here in this awful fucking cabin, with all its mice and its bugs and whatever else is going to crawl on us tonight.”

“All right,” she says, disturbed this time. And, well. She’s right. Not exactly the most encouraging opening to his speech, he’ll admit. But that’s what happens when you just kind of say whatever comes into your head, and Jaime is, by now, an expert at that. But he has been holding back this one thing, this one truth that he was too afraid to speak aloud, and now that it’s time to actually say it…he can feel it sitting heavily in his chest, in his stomach, pressing up against his throat. He just has to say it. He’s never had a problem with words before. He’s always been quite good at using them, whether as weapons or as salves, and he’s never had this problem before. This insecurity.

“It’s you,” he says. He says it quietly, maybe bitterly, maybe brokenly. He can’t tell. “It’s where you are. That’s where I want to be.”

She stares back at him. Sometimes, she is so difficult to read. She has this way of keeping her expression very level, and it’s so unfair, the way she can look at him like that, like she _knows_. He doesn’t know _what_ she knows, though. That’s the problem.

So, “I love you”, he says.

She stares at him some more. Her eyes are very wide.

“I do,” he says, emphasizing it, like he thinks she doesn’t believe him. Maybe she doesn’t! Who can say? Not him, with panic firing under his fingernails and in his veins the longer she doesn’t say anything. “I’ve loved you for months. Maybe years. I don’t know. I don’t know when it started. I just know that I’m here, with you, right now, and I don’t want you to leave. You may as well have kept those chains around me, Brienne, because I can feel you pulling me after you.”

She laughs.

It’s a short, sharp, shocked thing, and she puts her hands to her mouth immediately, her eyes wide and apologetic. He laughs, too, because it’s absolutely fucking ludicrous, confessing his love here, of all places.

“Do you?” she asks, finally, her voice quivering.

“Don’t laugh at me. I’m trying to be serious.”

“Are you?”

“Listen to you. This is ridiculous.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re _laughing_. I never imagined you would laugh at me.”

“What _did_ you imagine, then? Me refusing to believe it?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know. I had arguments prepared, just in case.”

“ _Arguments_.”

“Yes. You’re very stubborn. I wasn’t sure if you’d need convincing.”

“ _Convincing_!” She laughs harder at this. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m laughing.”

“Neither do I!”

“You opened with _mice_ and _bugs_.”

“Well. I’m honest, at least. And that was hardly the most important part, was it?”

“No,” she admits, like she’s considering. He can’t decide if he’s insulted or elated. It seems very right, to have her laugh at him like that. Maybe that’s pathetic. Maybe he’s fine with that. She laughs again, and he hears the giddiness, and she sits up, finally, shedding her blankets, and she reaches for him, and then her fingers are around his jaw, pulling him in, and she is kissing him, clumsily, but there is no sign of nervousness. Not in her fingers, nor in her lips. It’s just fond, and soft, and wanting, and Jaime aches, and he kisses her deeply in return. She is smiling against his lips, and he supposes he must be smiling, too. He shuffles closer. He puts his arms around her. She is clutching the front of his shirt, looking very pleased with herself. When they break apart, she’s red, the firelight flickering over her, but she does not look away or lower her eyes. She is not embarrassed, or uncertain. She looks at him with gladness.

* * *

He makes it a point, after that, to try and improve upon it. He waits until one beautiful sunset, somewhere in the Riverlands, and he tells her that he has written a sonnet about her beautiful eyes, and he gets two lines into it before Brienne is _braying_ laughter, shoving his shoulder and telling him to shut up. One evening, as they prepare to cross a river when the sunrise is filtering through the morning fog and turning everything around them dreamlike, he wonders aloud if Brienne would like it if he sang a song about her height, and she threatens to dunk him in the river, her smile spreading across her face. There is a beautiful little inn that they stay at, where they snuggle together in one bed, the blankets pulled around them as they trade lazy morning kisses, and he wonders if she would like it if he drew her like this, rosy and satisfied. She tells him that he can sleep on the floor at the next inn they stop at.

She doesn’t say it back. Not for a long while. But he doesn’t need her to. It’s there in her patient laughter and her giddy smiles and in the way she reaches for him, sometimes. Less often than he reaches for her, but it’s no less wanting, no less certain. By the time they reach King’s Landing, he is as certain of her as he has ever been about anything.

“I’ve written to my father,” she tells him as they walk through the city streets, their hoods pulled up to hide themselves away from scrutiny until they’re read to enter the Red Keep to face Tyrion and the others.

“Oh?” he asks.

“I told him I would be bringing you along.”

She looks at him, a quick little glance, and she is not laughing. She might actually be nervous about his response.

“Good,” he says, because he doesn’t want her to wait any longer than she has to. She nods. She hesitates. Takes his hand, briefly, and gives it a squeeze. He understands her more every day. She is not the same as him, when it comes to words. She doesn’t wield them in the same way he does. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel, and he knows that.

“What are you going to do about Casterly Rock?” she asks.

“I have no idea.”

“What are you going to tell Tyrion?”

“No idea,” he says, happily. She rolls her eyes. She pulls his hood more firmly, making sure he’s fully covered. A little act of care, like the millions she has shown him on this trip alone. It’s her version of words, he knows. That’s how she shows her care.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“You’ll have to be specific. I’m very much enjoying you fussing over me.”

She steps back a little bit, sending him a warning glare, but he meant it, and he smiles at her, and she seems to understand that. Her return smile is a little bit shy. A little bit overwhelmed. He understands that, too.

“Not having plans,” she elaborates, finally. “That’s what you’re enjoying.”

“Gods, yes. Is it that obvious?”

“You’re not very subtle about anything. You know that.”

“I do. I think it was Gendry that did it. Didn’t want to be a lord, so he just…quit. Left, went back north to be with Arya Stark, because he knew that was what would make him happy. I don’t think I’ve ever really thought about my life like that. Like I should choose what I want. Like I can just…choose what makes me happy. That’s sad, isn’t it?”

“I…I don’t know. I think it makes sense.”

“Of course you’d say that. But I think even you…you chose to follow good people. People you cared for. You chose to keep to your oaths. You did those things because they were what _you_ thought was right. I admire you for that, and I admire Gendry for that, too. I want to do it myself.”

“By following me to Tarth,” Brienne says, slowly.

“By not getting involved in this endless fucking political upheaval. By not doing whatever I’m supposed to do as Lannister Heir or Kingslayer or whatever I am. And yes, by following you. Wherever you go. I think for a while I was afraid of what you would think. I know from your perspective…I followed Cersei for most of my life. I did whatever she wanted of me, however much I could, because I thought that was what I was _for_. I know better now, but I know how it must seem to you. Like I was just looking for someone else to follow. I don’t know how to show you that this is different.”

“I know it’s different,” Brienne says, quiet and sure. Like everything else about her. He thinks about the days they spent at Winterfell after Cersei died, with Brienne tense and nervous around him, always watching him, trying to make his grief less difficult to bear, just by trying to be there for him. He thinks about the months after that, when they’d eat dinner together and she would smile at him or roll her eyes at his jokes or quietly laugh at the things he said. He thinks about how easy and companionable it was between them. He spent most of his life loving Cersei, but it was a long, long time before she died since he had actually _liked_ her. When was the last time they sat together and talked and actually enjoyed each others’ company? When it wasn’t about power and wasn’t about control and wasn’t about fulfilling whatever need it was that they found in each other? He isn’t sure. He really can’t remember. It was years, at least. But he has liked Brienne now for such a long time. In some ways, that feels more monumental than loving her. He likes her. He loves her. He wants to be with her, wherever she wants to be.

She meets his gaze, always steady, always sure, and he smiles at her. She smiles back. He has no idea what they’ll be doing tomorrow, or where they will be going. It doesn’t matter, because she’ll be with him. 


End file.
